Garments sold at retail clothing stores must often be altered to fit the customer. Many retailers typically offer to perform the alterations necessary to fit a garment to a customer's size and dimension when a garment is purchased.
Garment alterations are performed in alterations workrooms. Clothing retailers typically operate alterations workrooms on store premises. The alterations workroom may be located near gender-specific clothing departments and special purpose clothing departments (e.g., bridal department). Alternatively, alterations workrooms may be centrally located to accommodate all clothing departments in a particular store. A majority of alterations performed at clothing stores result from purchases by customers of the clothing store. Another possible configuration places a larger, central workroom off-site that can serve more than one store located within a given geographical area. Many clothing stores also provide alterations as a service for people who bring in their own garments.
Customers may also take the garments to be altered at tailor shops that specialize in garment alterations. Independent tailor shops provide a service for individuals who bring in their own clothing, but may also provide a service as an overflow resource for clothing stores or other tailor shops that periodically lack the capacity to perform the present workload in their alteration workrooms. Independent tailor shops often operate as chains of several tailor shops. Tailor shops may also range in size from a single alterations workroom to several workrooms.
The garment alterations process in tailor shops and in retail stores is similar. As the following description of the process illustrates, tailor shops and retailers face similar problems.
During the garment selling process, the customer tries the garment on to decide whether or not to purchase the garment. When the customer decides to purchase the garment, a fitter determines how the garment is to be altered to fit the customer. The fitter records fitting data on a paper alterations ticket and marks the garment according to the alterations to be performed. The fitting data includes customer information, sales information, garment information and alterations to be performed.
Once a fitter has recorded the fitting data necessary for each garment purchased, the garments are transferred to the alterations workroom. Garment transfer to the alterations workroom may occur at the end of the day, when all of the garments sold during the day are transferred together.
Alterations workrooms are typically organized according to basic steps in the alterations process. A typical alterations workroom includes an incoming garment rack, a waiting rack, at least one work space, an inspection rack and a completed rack. At some time after the garments are purchased and fitted, they are moved to the incoming garment rack in the alterations workroom.
Typically, when garments are placed on the incoming garment rack, a worker responsible for incoming garments examines each garment and the accompanying alteration ticket. Garments are prioritized in relation to other garments and may be placed on racks in an order that indicates the priority. Garment priority is based on a promised completion date.
The alterations are performed by sewers who work at one or more work spaces. As sewers complete alteration tasks, they return to the waiting rack for new alteration tasks to perform. Workers obtain the garments off the waiting rack and perform the alterations at their work spaces. Once alteration tasks are completed, the sewer places the garment on the inspection rack. Typically, a worker responsible for inspections retrieves the garment off the inspection rack to inspect the quality of the work and to compare the work done with the work noted on the alterations ticket. If the garment passes inspection, the garment is designated as complete.
Garments that have been completed are then placed on the completed rack. The garments remain in the workroom, typically organized by alphabetical order with respect to the customer's name. The completed garments may also be sent back to the department that sold the garment or to a central will-call area. The customer picks up the garment, or receives the garment if the store agreed to deliver the completed garment to the customers.
As the foregoing illustrates, the garment alterations process is by nature, a labor-intensive operation. Sewers use sewing machines, but the entire process is an inherently manual one that requires varying levels of skill. The process of tracking the work is also manual and dependent upon the use of manually generated sheets and reports.
Alteration shops are commonly viewed by retailers as cost centers, or as part of the business overhead. Because customers view charges for alterations as an added cost for the garment, retailers have little to promote in the way of alterations other than low alterations charges. Retailers are thus under great pressure to keep the cost of alterations at a minimum.
The pressure to keep alterations costs down makes the alterations process sensitive to costs incurred by inefficiencies and quality problems. With existing systems, little can be done to recoup costs resulting from inefficiencies and problems in quality. Moreover, alterations tend to provide an opportunity for new problems to arise in the sales process. If not done well, if the merchandise is lost, or if not performed in a timely manner, alterations can provide one more thing about which a customer can complain. Many stores also offer the alteration service for free, or even below-cost, leaving little room for a return on a costly payroll investment.
The management of alterations shops is often difficult for retailers. Many store managers, who likely have backgrounds in sales, do not really understand what happens in alterations shops. Moreover, information regarding the productivity of the alterations workers is either poorly documented, untimely or not available at all. The lack of information leads to guessing in making important strategic decisions such as how to price alterations, whether to increase or decrease labor resources and whether to centralize operations between stores. Lack of information is a problem from which even knowledgeable managers of tailor shops are not immune.
Sales associates lack incentive to accurately collect correct alterations fees. To secure a sale, the alteration fees may be reduced or eliminated for a customer by the sales associate. Also to secure a sale, the promise date for the altered garment may be set artificially early. Without access to this information, managers of alteration workrooms can not manage costs and revenue to budget. The problems with alterations ultimately lead to lost future sales income based on customer dissatisfaction.
Alterations are nevertheless, a necessary industry service required to achieve sales. Properly managed, the cost of alterations operations may be reduced, productivity may increase and lost income may be recovered.
Presently, systems exist to aid alteration shop managers in measuring shop performance. These systems primarily offer a service in which processed alterations tickets collected over statistically significant periods of time are gathered and delivered to a central office. The central office analyzes the tickets using some data processing system.
The paper alterations tickets contain specific data such as the work that was ordered, the name of the person who performed the work, the price paid and various other items of information that enable the data processing system to determine factors such as workroom efficiency or even worker efficiency. The data processing system then sends a report to the operator or manager of the alteration shop detailing the workers' and workroom's performance along with evaluations based on a variety of performance factors.
The above approach suffers from long lag times between the time the work is done and the time the report is received. Typically, reports cover a time period of about a month. Any less of a time period would diminish the significance of the results. Any more of a time period would only extend the time lag to receive the reports.
Another problem with the central data processing approach is in the inherent inaccuracies that are often present in the alterations tickets. When a fitter or an alterations workroom gets busy, mistakes may be made in documenting alterations tickets. In a rush, the alteration ticket information may be recorded in an unreadable manner. One common inaccuracy occurs when the number of alterations performed does not match the number of alterations requested. Other types of inaccuracies may not even be evident from the alteration tickets. If the ticket is illegible, or erroneously prepared, the central data processing system typically makes assumptions about the work. The central data processing system is then left with an inaccurate or incomplete collection of data from which only inaccurate or incomplete performance ratings may be derived.
The processing of the paper ticket data may take six to twelve weeks to complete. By the time the operator of an alteration shop receives performance measurements, as many as three or four months may have elapsed since the work was performed. Problems that could have been solved with timely performance information have likely re-occurred many times over. Moreover, problems may become difficult or impossible to solve after a long period of occurrence. Inefficiencies that could have been eliminated with timely information likely resulted in increased shop costs over that time.
Other systems have attempted to cut into the time lag described above. In one approach, the central data processing system is sold to alteration shop chains or department stores and used to analyze workroom performance within the chain. The central office is a part of the same organization as the alterations workroom. Having the central office within the same organization makes uniform ticket handling procedures possible. This approach, however, has met with limited success. The system is nevertheless the same with regard to the time lag in obtaining results.
It would be desirable for a system to receive alterations data in real time or at least in time for a workroom manager to take action on it in a short period of time. It is further desirable to know the workload against available labor before work is sent into the process, so that alterations tasks may be better planned.